Going for the Look, but Risking Discrimination

Published: July 13, 2003

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The federal government has accused some of those businesses of going too far. The hotel entrepreneur Ian Schrager agreed to a $1.08 million settlement three years ago after the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission accused his Mondrian Hotel in West Hollywood of racial discrimination for firing nine valets and bellhops, eight of them nonwhite. Documents filed in court showed that Mr. Schrager had written memos saying that he wanted a trendier group of workers and that the fired employees were ''too ethnic.''

Last month the commission reached a $5,000 settlement with 36th Street Food and Drink, a restaurant in St. Joseph, Mo., after accusing it of age discrimination against a 47-year-old waitress. The waitress, Michele Cornell, had worked at the restaurant for 23 years, but when it reopened after renovations, it refused to rehire her because, the commission said, she no longer fit the young, trendy look it had adopted.

''The problem with all this image stuff is it just reeks of marketing for this white-bread, Northern European, thin, wealthy, fashion-model look,'' said Donna Harper, supervisory attorney in the commission's St. Louis office. ''We all can't be Anglo, athletic and young.''

Ms. Harper said an employer who insisted on hiring only athletic-looking people could be viewed as discriminating against a person in a wheelchair. Employers who insisted on hiring only strapping, tall people might be found guilty of discriminating against Mexican-Americans or Asian-Americans, who tend to be shorter, she added.

Stephen J. Roppolo, a New Orleans lawyer who represents many hotels and restaurants, said: ''Hiring someone who is attractive isn't illegal per se. But people's views on what's attractive may be influenced by their race, their religion, their age. If I think Caucasian people are more attractive than African-American people, then I may inadvertently discriminate in an impermissible way. I tell employers that their main focus needs to be hiring somebody who can get the job done. When they want to hire to project a certain image, that's where things can get screwy.''

Image seemed very much in evidence the other evening at the Abercrombie & Fitch store in Water Tower Place, one of Chicago's most upscale malls. Working there were a 6-foot-2 sales clerk with muscles rippling under his Abercrombie T-shirt and a young long-haired blond clerk, her navel showing, who could have been a fashion model.

''If you see an attractive person working in the store wearing Abercrombie clothes, it makes you want to wear it, too,'' said Matthew Sheehey, a high school senior from Orland Park, a Chicago suburb.

Elysa Yanowitz says that when she was a West Coast sales manager for L'Oréal, she felt intense pressure to hire attractive saleswomen, even if they were incompetent. In fact, she says, company officials sought to force her out after she ignored an order to fire a woman a top manager described as not ''hot'' enough.

''It was pretty well understood that they had to have magazine-look quality,'' she said of the sales force. ''Everyone is supposed to look like a 110-pound model.''

L'Oréal officials did not respond to a request for comment.

Melissa Milkie, a sociology professor at the University of Maryland who has written about perceptions of beauty, said: ''Good-looking people are treated better by others. Maybe companies have noticed that hiring them impacts their bottom line. Whether that's morally proper is a different question.''

Photos: The Gap and Benetton are among the retailers known for hiring attractive people from many backgrounds and races, as both models and clerks.; Elizabeth Nill says she has been offered jobs at three Abercrombie & Fitch stores in the Chicago area, apparently because of the way she looks. (Stephen Rose for The New York Times)